


How Large the Teeth

by Inaccessible Rail (strangetales)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:11:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2694305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetales/pseuds/Inaccessible%20Rail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy keeps having visions of monsters, Clarke is dying, it’s been raining for five days straight, and <i>dammit</i>, he can’t <i>breathe</i>. (Set sometime in S1, est. relationship.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Large the Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into the _100_ ‘verse, so please forgive the potential mess. Inspired by Hozier’s “In the Woods Somewhere.” Also, a lot of this is written in a kind of "stream of consciousness" type way, so if that ain't your thing, I'm sorry.

_How many years I know I’ll bear --  
I found something in the woods somewhere._

There’s a monster watching them from the trees, and it’s not a Grounder; it’s not a man or a woman cloaked in layers of matted fur, skin marred in blood and dried mud -- and it’s not the Chancellor, or the pale faces of the people aboard the Ark he had sentenced to death, their mouths slack and eyes glassy. It’s a _real_ monster, the likes of which he had invented as a young boy when Octavia was desperate for something other than love stories, when she had begged him for a kind of fear that she could remove from her own.

> “But what did it look like?” she whispered between her cupped hands, as if it would _hear._ “No one knows,” he answered ominously, “but they knew it was there; they could hear the screams of their neighbors in the night—” Octavia’s eyes slammed shut, the lashes quivering, “—and in the morning, _they’d be gone._ ”

“Do you remember those stories you used to tell me?”

Clarke Griffin had been quarantined on the second floor of the drop-ship for three, almost four days; he could hear the torturous sliding of her heated skin against the rough blankets -- the sloshing of water in a dirty basin; a stomach-churning, wet noise that forced its way out of her lungs. No one else could hear her but he could (he claimed) -- Jasper was nothing compared to this.

“Bell.”

Their tents were always suffocating in the rainy season, so they would try to keep the flaps propped open to let in the fresh air, even if it made the entrance muddy; if the wind was particularly strong and knocked his maps and diagrams to the floor. He liked the sound the heavy drops made against the fabric, almost like an echo, deep and hypnotic.

“Bell.” Octavia, older now, and _louder_ \-- slapping him playfully on the arm. “Remember?”

“Yeah,” he answered, shaking his head, “Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, I was just thinking,” she said, staring out into the rain, “these woods, they seem so familiar sometimes.”

“Familiar?”

“Like in the stories,” she paused, contemplative, and he finally broke his gaze with the falling rain to spare her an inquisitive glance. “Like… I don’t know -- there might really be a monster out there.”

“No monsters O,” he reassured her, teasing, “just boys you like to date, apparently.”

“Shut up.”

Four days.

\--

It was before the rain had begun, and the days were still warm; though not unbearably so. There was a comfortable breeze, and the scent of late-summer flowers lingered in the air. He hadn’t been especially prepared for it, and he would torture himself over it later. _How had he not seen it?_ The slightly pale tint to her usually red cheeks, the bruised circles beneath her eyes; maybe if he had been paying more attention.

The sound of her body hitting the forest floor wasn’t something he would soon forget, how unusually _heavy_ , as if gravity had simply become _more_. She had always seemed so small and light, he couldn’t even recall having heard the rustling of her feet against the earth in months. He had seen her hair out of the corner of his eye, the blonde waves floating menacingly in a shallow creek. Things had moved quickly after that, his large hands gently cupping the back of her skull as if she had turned into wet paper, the flesh of her melting and slipping through his fingers.

He thought she had whispered his name, the letters floating on the air between her lips and his ears, but maybe it was wishful thinking, maybe she had said nothing at all.

\--

It had infected her. It took people, but not in the way that he once imagined it had; sharp claws and teeth, dripping with saliva and blood, a large, unruly beast that stood horrifying and imposing over the defenseless villagers.

It was silent and invisible, and it existed right on the edges of his vision, in the sudden darkness of the tree line, in between the wet leaves and branches, a malevolent presence that forced its way between her lips, down her throat, in between her lungs and now they were both _suffocating_. He couldn’t breathe inside his tent, couldn’t breathe outside -- not when she was drowning in it, losing a battle against an enemy he hadn’t warned her about and this is _his_ fault. He had created it, given it life and breath until there was no air left for anyone else, and maybe the monster he had warned Octavia about was himself, maybe he should shrink and twist himself into an inky blackness, lost in the impenetrable fog that had settled around the edge of camp.

Maybe she would be better off.

“You should be with her,” Octavia muttered softly from her cot, legs held tight against her torso, eyes wide and aimed right at him, as if he were target practice.

At his silence she pressed further, and he could feel the hot point of a bullet pushing ever so slowly into the center of his forehead, the flesh rippling to accommodate the intrusion, _“She could die.”_

\--

He could swear that the creaking of the second-floor hatch sounds like a strangled gasp, and his hands drop from the handle as if burned -- but Raven shoots him a strange look and he resumes this now dreadful turning, only days ago a commonplace, non-event, and now, every second since she had fallen, and since the rain had begun, only _events_.

It’s dark except for the comforting glow of a few candles scattered throughout, and he can see the reflection of her face in the bowl of water he had imagined in his waking nightmares, the flames illuminating the stark lines of her face, thinner then he remembers, light, even though there had been all that _weight_.

“I’m sorry,” he mouthed into the skin of her fingers, his own eyes shut tight against the painfully unfamiliar sight of not-her.

“Hi.” It was a whisper a near octave lower then the voice of a smaller sister, scared of being found -- but there was a weak smile that he could _feel_ , and it _hurt_. Her eyes were open enough that he could see the pale blue of her irises, a late-afternoon, pre-storm blue, a diminished vibrancy.

“Bellamy,” she spoke again, licked her lips to ward off the dryness there, and he felt the light pressure of her fingers against his own.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here,” he answered, his eyes finally meeting her own. “I couldn’t—”

Couldn’t finish a sentence, couldn’t apologize, couldn’t _fix her_. Destroy that _thing_ once and for all, dash it against the cliffs at the edge of the woods, watch it tumble and break against the earth, lost to the unknown, the past, _whatever_ , if he could just get rid of the damn thing -- but here it was, like a dark passenger, clinging to him and so it clung to her and he couldn’t let it -- he could hear it in her voice and breath, squeezing her lungs as if it were a vice; _tight_.

“I’m going to fix this,” he finished, lightly passing his hand over her damp forehead, wisps of her hair clinging to her skin; the salt burned on his lips and he licked it away, it mingled with the dryness of his own mouth and he could almost taste her like it had been weeks ago and she had been wrapped around him, light and heavy all at once.

“I’ll fix it.”

\--

He could hear Octavia’s voice calling after him for miles, echoing in his eardrums; the wind, the rain, and the wet, crackling breath of Clarke in the candlelight -- all of it a bleak choir screaming at the back of his mind, an apt soundtrack for hunting a thing that probably doesn’t even _exist_ , but how else is he supposed to get her back? Protect his sister? _Protect them all?_

There’s a whimpering sound coming from the ground and it’s caught in a Grounder trap, some fox-like creature, pointed ears tilted in his direction, lips raised in a pained snarl, thick saliva dripping over its black lips and he can’t help but feel a strangling sympathy; it’s foot mangled in the rusted metal, the white of the bone bright in the occasional lightening strike. Atom, he remembers, burned flesh and dead eyes, and then _her_ , all soft sounds like his mother and sister in a home that felt more like a prison, soft hands but a sharp blade and it slipped into his neck like it was _butter_ , and she had done it all on her own. No help from him.

He had run from the camp with no weapons, _stupid_ , but in some kind of strange twist there’s a large rock at his feet, wet, cold, and just heavy enough to put the poor thing out of its misery -- and suddenly it’s quiet. The rain has not stopped, he can feel his clothes clinging to his skin, a strong wind blows the wet hair over his brow, but it’s silent, and the animal is thrashing now, it must be growling, crying; but it is silent, and the weight of the rock in his hand is heavy, so it falls _hard_ , and when the sound returns it _crunches_ and there is _blood_ , and he can taste iron and salt.

In this post-kill, post-silence place he hadn’t heard it approach at his back, hadn’t felt it’s warm breath until now and he could _smell_ it -- like death, like the drop-ship, and he could fight it with the rock that he had come to grip so tightly that he felt its sharp angles piercing the callused skin of his hands but then he heard it -- like a warning, like the Grounder’s trumpeting, but it was lyrical, and soft, and it was his name: _Bellamy._ It was more then one, each with its own unique cadence; desperately, lovingly, pleadingly -- did he even stand a chance at winning? _Who would protect them then?_

Like the beast released from its trap he ran, the rain and wind growing ever louder, increasingly heavy, the drops lashed against his cheeks like a whip and he felt the rock fall from his hand, lost to the wind and the darkness of the forest he could only hope that it choked on it, swallowed it whole and felt its sharp edges slice its insides just like it had carved valleys into the palm of his hand, to drown in its own blood -- _it would never take anyone again._

\--

At daybreak the rain had ceased, the sun daring to peek out from in between the thick clouds every so often, as if it didn’t want to get its hopes up. The camp was still silent when he returned to find Octavia at the gate, her chin resting against her chest in a troubled sleep, the gun strap slowly slipping off of her shoulder.

She awoke briefly when he had lifted her in his arms, a lazy smile spreading itself across her face and she sighed in relief, knocking her head softly against his chin. “’M glad you’re back.”

“Where else would I go?” he answered quietly, dropping her gently atop the blankets in their tent; she was asleep before she could answer.

\--

“I used to tell her these stories,” he began in the flickering light of her last candle, his voice bouncing off the walls of the empty ship, “to scare her, because she was sick of being scared for her own life and wanted someone else to be scared for a change.”

Her eyes remained shut but he saw the weak nod of her head, a smile appear, and he noted that it was stronger then the night before -- less resigned.

“I thought it was real,” he gasped, almost laughter, a strangled, strange sound that he had never felt before, and he hated it, but continued, _“I thought I killed you.”_

They were an early-morning blue once again, like what he thought the ocean might look like if they ever lived long enough to see it, like the radioactive butterflies that followed Octavia through the trees, and her hand found his and she held it so very _tight_ he could feel the warm blood dripping down their entwined forearms but he could only find it within himself to marvel at the strength of her hands, and the easiness of their shared breath.

_I clutched my life and wished it kept --  
My dearest love, I’m not done yet._

**Author's Note:**

> So, to be quite honest with y’all, I had wanted to write some vapid, romantic one-shot about Bellamy and Clarke, but it kind of turned into a Bellamy character study? And I’m sorry about that, but there is _some_ romance here, clearly, it cannot be denied. Hopefully next time I can find it within myself to be a little less intense and just get on with the smooching and shit.
> 
> Come talk to me on [Tumblr](http://starlessness.tumblr.com) about stuff and things.


End file.
